OpenAI unveils App Store for custom chatbots
OpenAI said Wednesday it was opening an app store where people could share customized versions of its popular chatbot ChatGPT, as the artificial intelligence company works to expand the reach of its flagship technology and turn it into a moneymaker.
The new store is called the GPT Store. People who spend $20 a month for a subscription to OpenAI’s ChatGPT Plus service can search the store for custom chatbots that offer a wide range of services, including those that recommend books, teach math, and search scientific articles.
The store will “help you find useful and popular custom versions of ChatGPT,” the company said in a blog post.
Founded as a research lab, OpenAI is increasingly operating as a for-profit company looking to compete with rivals like Google. With the new store, the company hopes to transform its technology into an online platform that connects companies and customers.
Over the past four years, Microsoft has invested $13 billion in OpenAI, which has also raised money from other investors. The San Francisco startup is in talks to complete a deal that would bring its valuation to more than $80 billion.
Seasoned software developers have long used ChatGPT’s underlying technology, GPT-4, to build their own applications, including search engines and automated tutors. The app store is a way for a new audience – individuals and small businesses with no software development experience – to distribute apps based on the same technology.
In recent months, OpenAI has been working to improve and expand ChatGPT in other ways. In September, it folded its DALL-E image generator into ChatGPT and released a new version of the chatbot that communicates with people through spoken words, much like Apple’s digital assistant Siri.
The company also said Wednesday that it would offer a version of its chatbot called ChatGPT Teams. Available for $25 to $30 per user per month, ChatGPT Teams gives businesses and other groups a way to use the chatbot in a way that keeps their data private. Any information shared through the service will not be used to train the AI technologies, OpenAI said.
(The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft last month for copyright infringement on news content related to AI systems.)
The GPT Store opens after OpenAI created a service in November that allows people to build custom chatbots called “GPTs.” Anyone can quickly customize ChatGPT for a specific task, without the help of additional software or computer code.
For example, the website AllTrails.com has designed a chatbot that recommends hiking trails. Khan Academy, a nonprofit education group, has built one that can help people learn to write computer programs. Three million custom chatbots have been created in the past two months, according to OpenAI.
The store is designed to expand the number of people who use and pay for services like ChatGPT Plus. OpenAI said it would start sharing revenue with those who offer customized versions of the chatbot, based on how often each customized chatbot is used.